May 9, 2025
News Updates
On Monday, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to admit approximately 12,000 refugees under a court order that partially blocks Trump’s efforts to suspend the refugee resettlement program. The ruling followed arguments by the Justice Department (DOJ) over how to interpret a prior federal appeals court ruling regarding how many refugees were to be processed. The DOJ argued that it should only have to admit 160 refugees and would likely appeal any ruling to admit thousands, but the judge dismissed that interpretation, saying it required “not just reading between the lines” of the prior ruling, “but hallucinating new text that simply is not there.”
Last Thursday, U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez, Jr. ruled that President Trump cannot use the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) to quickly deport Venezuelan migrants who are detained in a South Texas detention facility. The judge who was appointed by Trump stated that the rarely used law can only be utilized when an “organized, armed force” is entering the U.S., therefore Trump cannot use it to deport alleged members of the Tren de Aragua (TDA) gang.
A second federal judge in New York ruled on Tuesday that Trump did not validly invoke the AEA as he granted a preliminary injunction in the case of two individuals who were pulled off planes headed for El Salvador and returned to New York from Texas, where they had been detained as alleged TDA members.
These rulings signal potential difficulties for President Trump as the Supreme Court decides whether to lift its current block on the use of the AEA and potentially provide a resolution on whether he has the power to use the AEA nationally.
A federal appeals court rejected a request by the Trump administration to allow it to revoke the temporary legal status of over 500,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans living in the U.S. The DHS had previously moved to cut short the 2-year humanitarian parole granted to the migrants under the Biden administration, but a U.S. district judge had halted the action.
